Inheritance

The roots of China’s recent boom extend deep into its imperial and communist past. But tradition’s legacy is a complicated one. To achieve modern development, China had to throw off the “yoke” of traditional society. Yet the long traditions of centralized government administration, kin-based entrepreneurism, and value placed on education and diligence prepared the Chinese well for capitalism. Despite catastrophes like the Great Leap Forward and the famine in its wake, Mao Zedong’s nation building efforts between the founding of the PRC in 1949 and the unleashing of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 laid socialist foundations for the subsequent boom. Even the disastrous, decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution contributed to the boom: By eroding public support for radical politics, the ground was cleared for a transition from revolution to reform—for new policies that were gradualist, internationalist and capitalist.

The Cultural Revolution Broke All Patterns of Restraint

The Cultural Revolution

China’s Growth is Like a Slingshot

An Opportunity to Question the Whole Existing System

Pallavi Aiyar

Journalist

Pallavi Aiyar spent more than six years in China writing for The Hindu and the Indian Express newspapers. She was the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent to be based in the country. Aiyar is the winner of the 2007 Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis, the youngest ever recipient of the prize. Aside from her work as a journalist, she has taught news writing to students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and served as advisor to the Confederation of Indian Industry on China-related issues.

Aiyar holds degrees from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University, Oxford University and the London School of Economics.

China had a communist revolution which, like it or not, kind of wrenched it from a feudal past and propelled it into a kind of modernity that continues to escape India today, which remains, very much, a feudal society. And the kind of continuities with the past in India are far stronger than they are in China. As a result, it [India] remains a deeply misogynist and deeply patriarchal society, which there are huge elements of in China today as well, but there was a dislocation that was created in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which means that the participation of [Chinese] women in the workforce today is higher than the world average, while in India it’s really much, much lower than the world average. If you look at female literacy figures, it’s more or less the same as male literacy, because maybe one or two percentage points down; in India it’s something like less than 50% of women are considered literate today. So, of course, when you have half of your population, and less than half of those are literate, that’s bound to have a big impact on any kind of economic growth story. So, gender empowerment is something that is very much there to China’s advantage… as other aspects of human development, and that is really, in some ways, the biggest gulf between India and China; not just the infrastructure which people tend to focus a lot on, but human development, and by this I’m talking about literacy, gender empowerment, dignity of labor, those kinds of issues.